Today I read the
next fifty pages of Hard-Boiled
Wonderland. It’s in this part of the novel that the themes of mind and
identity begin to assert themselves much more clearly. In the Hard-Boiled
Wonderland part of the novel, we learn more about what a Calcutec actually
does; to be precise, we learn that a Calcutec’s training involves the
extraction, reprogramming, and reinstallation of a Calcutec’s core
consciousness. The Calcutec himself doesn’t know much about this process, and
at this point, the reader is also not privy to the details. Meanwhile, in the
Town it becomes increasingly clear that the Dreamreader’s problems largely
derive from the fact that he still has what no one else in the town has,
namely, a mind. As long as his Shadow survives, so will some semblance of his
mind, but it is not clear whether or not the Dreamreader is string enough or
even wants to maintain his mind under these circumstances. Once we find out
that the Calcutec’s code word is End of the World, which is also another name
for the Town, it becomes even more obvious that the two stories are
interconnected. The disappearance of the Professor, and the Calcutec’s efforts
to help his granddaughter find the Professor may shed more light on the nature
of that connection.
I also read the next
fifty pages of Paula Rabinowitz’s Black
& White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism. This is an easy
book to get confused about. It’s not really about noir in the conventional
sense, and so fans of film noir and noir crime fiction are likely to be disappointed
by it. It’s not even a book about materials that influence noir in the
conventional sense of either ‘noir’ or ‘influence’! Rabinowitz is generally
very careful not to argue for specific lines of influence (except in some cases
that I’ll look at in future posts). Rather, it’s about noir as a kind of master
key for America culture during World War II and in the postwar period. An
example of this argument and approach is Rabinowitz’s chapter on the
photography of Esther Bubley, who worked first for the Farm Security
Administration and then for the Office of War Information. Rabinowitz argues
that Bubley’s photos of the private and working lives of American women during
wartime not only form an interesting and significant exception to mainstream
patriotic boosterism but also invented “the icons of female pulp modernism—on
the one hand, a kind of sleepwalking existence of endless sexual deferral; on
the other, eventual economic self-sufficiency.” It’s a fascinating argument
about a significant female artist of whom I’d never heard before reading
Rabinowitz’s work. It shows just what Rabinowitz accomplishes here and how she
does it.
I also watched the next episode of The Fall. When I first saw the scene where Gillian Anderson’s
character initiates a one-night stand with one of the cops she meets in Belfast
I thought it was a mistake, especially when that cop is subsequently murdered
and everyone judges Anderson for what she did. Even if those judgements are
clearly signaled to be a compound of hypocrisy and patriarchal double
standards, the extent to which the viewer is now unavoidably focused on the
sexuality of Anderson’s character rather than, say, her professional competence,
initially seemed to me a distraction from the other themes the show was developing.
Upon further reflection, however, I’ve changed my mind. As the murderer’s
motives become somewhat more clear, it seems that the show as a whole is
preoccupied with the ways in which a patriarchal culture attempts to control
and judge (sexually active, professional, and independent) women by using everything
from shaming to homicidal violence. In this sense, the sexuality of Anderson’s
character is just as integral to the show’s goals as the murder plot.
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